November 24, 2009, Tuesday

And here it is, looming like a giant stuffed bat on a stick, the easiest target on Broadway. ''Dracula, the Musical,'' which sets the familiar tale of old snaggletooth to the familiar music of Frank Wildhorn, creaked open last night at the Belasco...

LET'S say you are the long-dead author of a 19th-century novel. Along comes Frank Wildhorn, the Broadway composer responsible for such lavish spectacles as ''Jekyll & Hyde'' and ''The Scarlet Pimpernel,'' and he's looking to adapt your book. What can...

The colors still glisten in ''Finian's Rainbow.'' As the delightfully easygoing concert production at the Irish Repertory Theater attests, no Broadway score is quite so beguiling from beginning to end as Burton Lane's savory stew of Celtic lilt,...

''FINIAN'S RAINBOW'' may not be the first musical comedy that preaches racial equality, but the 1947 Broadway hit is surely the only one in which the message is delivered by a leprechaun searching for his magic gold (it has been stolen.) ''A rose is...